


Sonatina For Unaccompanied Minor

by greenlily



Category: Archer's Goon - Diana Wynne Jones
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Domestic, Gen, Kidfic, Written in 2008, pretentious performing arts scholars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-02
Updated: 2011-09-02
Packaged: 2017-10-23 08:28:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/248270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenlily/pseuds/greenlily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>All children, except one, grow up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sonatina For Unaccompanied Minor

**Author's Note:**

  * For [athersgeo](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athersgeo/gifts).



> Written for athersgeo in the Yuletide 2008 Challenge. Originally posted at the Yuletide Treasure archive.

December 13, 1984

The trouble started the day Anthea came home from school to find the Goon sitting in their kitchen. Again.

It was Ann who had called him the Goon. Ann was one of the musicians who lived with them and saw to the tea when their parents were out. When Howard opened the door and Anthea swept through it, the first person she saw was Ann, sitting extremely still and pointedly not picking up her teacup.

"Not again." Anthea undid the tie at the neck of her cape and flung it over a chair. "I've told you and told you. You can do as you like, but I'm not going to help you, no matter what you say to Howard." She went to the sink and began refilling the kettle.

"She won't, you know," Howard added. He tried to accompany this with the weary man-of-the-world sigh he'd been cultivating since he'd begun studying for his O-levels. It got caught somehow and he choked and sputtered.

The Goon thumped Howard on the back absently. "All Hathaway's fault," he said. "Should never have taken you to see him in the first place."

Anthea slammed the full kettle onto the stove and turned the ON dial with more force than necessary. "How can it possibly be Mr Hathaway's fault that you're an unspeakable pest?"

"Hathaway's fault you don't believe me," the Goon explained. "Taught you too much common sense this time."

"Mr Hathaway hasn't taught me anything," put in Howard quickly. "And I don't believe you either. Anthea might like fairy tales, but I'm too old for them."

Ann didn't try to get in the middle when Anthea and the Goon had this conversation, not any more. She pushed back her chair and stood up. "Yes, well, this has been a lovely visit, but you'll have to excuse us now. Howard has homework and Anthea needs to hang up her cape, please, and then go and do her singing practice."

"More Hathaway," said the Goon grimly.

Anthea yanked her cape off the chair, which fell over. "Oh, shut up about Mr Hathaway, can't you? He's the nicest teacher anyone ever had. What do you know about being nice to anyone? You visit when no one's asked you, and say rude things, and you ought to just--" She paused for breath and briefly thought some of the words Mum used when the car wouldn't start.

Instead, she finished "--get _lost!_ "

And, just like that, the Goon vanished. One moment he was there, the next moment his chair was empty.

"That wasn't wise," said Ann. She looked at the kitchen window. "More snow's coming. I've got packages to fetch from the Post Office before it starts."

Anthea stared at the chair the Goon had vanished from. Something tight and buzzing seemed to be wrapped around the part of her where Mr Hathaway always told her to take deep breaths. "Where's he gone?"

"I don't know," said Ann calmly. "I expect he doesn't either. That was what you wanted, wasn't it?"

"I never did," began Anthea, then trailed off.

"You told him to get lost. So now he is." Howard spun around in his chair to look at Ann, who was digging in the bottom of the cupboard for her warm boots. "It's all true, then."

Ann straightened up and looked directly back at him. "The Goon has never told you anything that wasn't true. Or you," she added, looking over at Anthea. "Although, to be honest, I don't think he expected this."

"Expected what?" said Anthea shakily.

"That you'd be able to say something and it would happen as though it had always been there." Ann sat down and began pulling her boots on. "It's a backwards form of being able to speak only the truth. I have a friend who's got it, or was given it--it's rather a long story."

"True Speech," said Anthea. "Wizards. Everything he's told Howard whenever he came to visit. It's--I said something and it came true. Does that make me a wizard too?"

"I shouldn't think so," said Ann cheerfully, from the depths of the muffler she was wrapping around her head. "I began quite suddenly to understand what the cat was saying when I was about your age, and it went away after a few months. But you'd better mind your speech, just in case. Just think what would happen if some of the other things you've said came true."

Anthea felt ill. "So why did the Goon--"

"We'll talk about it when I come back," said Ann firmly. "Only if you promise to do your practice after. Hang up your cape, please, and look after the kettle." Going out the door, she glanced back at Howard. "You might go and bring down your notebooks before you begin your arithmetic."

Anthea picked up the fallen chair and draped her cape over the wooden hanger in the cupboard, brushing off the dust. She had begged two years' worth of Christmases and birthdays for a heavy wool cloak with a hood instead of a winter coat, and had only got it by promising to take as much care with it as she would with a bicycle or something else equally dear. It was dark gray with a soft, thick red string to tie up the hood and hang in tassels down the front. Howard was growing tired of his friends teasing him about walking about with Little Red Riding Hood, and Anthea was beginning to think a blue string would have done just as well.

Howard went upstairs and came down with a neat stack of spiral-bound notebooks. He began a new one every year, filling it up with stories at the front and lists at the back and all sorts of things in between. Anthea rather thought that what Ann wanted him to look at was somewhere in the middle.

When Ann came back from the Post Office, Anthea poured the tea and the three of them sat around the table. Without saying anything, they all left the Goon's usual chair empty. Howard had been leafing through the notebooks, and had set aside the one he'd begun the year he was ten.

"You wanted me to look at what the Goon's told me," said Howard. "Is that what you meant?"

"Well, since you like to make lists, I thought we might as well begin there," said Ann. She smiled. "My father brought me up to pay attention to well-kept records."

Anthea looked at Howard to see if this made any sense to him. Both of them had met Ann's father several times. Mr Abraham worked in the Natural History section of the Museum, and he didn't seem to pay attention to much of anything apart from butterflies and drawings of stick insects. Howard shrugged and opened his 1981 notebook towards the front. He handed it across to Ann. No one said anything for a moment, until Ann looked up from the notebook and made a go-ahead motion at Howard.

Howard turned his chair a bit to face Anthea. "The Goon started visiting when you were a baby. He told me all kinds of stories at first, but when you got old enough to listen, it seemed as though he began telling the same one over and over. Eighty-one was the first year I started writing down what he said, to see if it really was always the same."

"What do you remember about the story he told?" asked Ann, holding the notebook so Anthea couldn't see what was written on the page.

"Once upon a time, there were seven young wizards," began Anthea. The Goon said very little, even when he told the story, so it was like remembering something you'd seen written in enormous letters in the middle of a blank page. "Their parents were wizards too. The seven children quarreled with each other and with their parents. Their parents had enough and turned them out to seek their own fortunes. The youngest had more power than all the others, so their parents laid it on the older six to look after him until he was old enough to know how to use his powers. The seven of them went to live in a town that had no wizards."

Anthea paused, because this was the part that stopped being like a fairy tale and became more like a lie people expected you to believe. "The youngest wizard was mad for spaceships, it was the kind of magic he wanted to do, but spaceships need science and the science hadn't been invented yet. He had enough magic to move himself forward in time, when there would be enough science. And he made machines to build his spaceship for him. But when he tried to go back in time to where he'd been, he turned into a baby." She stopped and looked at Ann. "Have I got it right?"

Ann was looking at her oddly. "Howard remembers it a little differently, actually. But never mind."

"All right. The baby wizard was adopted by some people who didn't know about wizards, and he was a baby so he didn't know he'd been a wizard. The other six wizards tried to go away and do magic, but they couldn't get past the edge of the town. It was because of the magic their wizard parents put on them, to look after the youngest--that didn't go away just because he had new parents now. They fought some more among themselves and had to share the town among them, because none of them could get rid of the others."

Anthea's throat was getting dry, and she absent-mindedly took a sip from Howard's teacup. "Two of the wizards chased after the youngest and he went to where the spaceship was being built, and it made him remember that he was a wizard. But the spaceship was broken, the machines had been building it wrong. The youngest wizard was so angry that he did it all again. He made the machines build again, and he went back in time again. And this time, he took all of time back with him when he went."

"Well, I didn't mean to," said Howard. "Not exactly."

Anthea dropped the teacup.

"I really didn't," Howard continued, staring fixedly at his arithmetic. "I thought I'd only become a baby again, not that everything would go back to what it had been when I was a baby the first time, and--" He finally looked up and saw Anthea's face. "And you didn't remember this part at all."

"No," said Anthea faintly. "I always got confused about the going back in time bit and stopped trying to follow it. Would you finish it? Please?"

"I suppose I'd better," said Howard. He got up and fetched the brush and dustpan, and swept up the broken china while he talked. "I fixed the robots to build the spaceship properly. And I made some plans so the others wouldn't know why they were still stuck here. And then I went back, and it all happened again."

Howard went over to the rubbish bin and tipped in the bits of china and dust. "Mum and Dad adopted me again. I'd been thirteen the first time, when the others began chasing me, and I was thirteen the second time when the Goon turned up." He tried to smile at Anthea. "You were rather a handful, and the Goon was the first person besides me who could make you do much of anything. I couldn't make out at first whether that made me hate him more or not."

"Did I have a cape?" said Anthea stupidly. It was the only thing she could think of, somehow.

"No. You had a terrible temper and you could shriek like anything. You followed me, too, when I went back and found the spaceship the second time." Howard sighed. "That second time, it was perfect, the spaceship I mean. And it was all for nothing, because by then the three eldest wizards--"

"Your brothers," said Anthea.

"A brother and two sisters. They were round the bend by then, and I got it in my head that the only way I could make right what I'd done was to use my spaceship to send them where they couldn't hurt anyone else. So I did."

"What became of the other wizards?" asked Ann. She had been listening quietly. Anthea thought perhaps she'd been waiting to make Howard tell the things he didn't want to tell. It certainly sounded as if she already knew the answer to her question.

"One of them's gone to America," said Howard quickly. "He fancied music and there's a lot of it in New York that he liked." He took a deep breath and looked at Anthea. "One of the others, the oldest one who was left, was fond of music too. He had taught it once, to the children of queens. Three years ago, he agreed to take one last student."

"Mr Hathaway's a wizard," said Anthea, trying to keep all of it in order. "That's what the Goon meant. I always thought it was strange that his part of the Museum has curtains over its windows all the time, but of course he doesn't want anyone seeing inside, not if he's doing magic." She thought for a moment. Howard waited. "Mr Hathaway teaches me music, but if I sing well for forty minutes he lets me earn five extra minutes at the end and he tells me stories with all kinds of useful things in them. The Goon said Mr Hathaway had taught me too much common sense _this_ time. This is the second time I've, I've, _been_. Been born. And Mr Hathaway didn't teach me the first time, but the second time someone made him give me singing lessons." She looked across at Ann.

"You'd be too young to remember," said Ann. "Your mother came home one day when you were four and I had been teaching you and Howard to sing the song about `White coral bells upon a silver stalk'. Howard was staring at the floor and scowling and singing his notes all-anyhow."

"It was a song for little girls!" protested Howard.

"You were twirling about the room," Ann told Anthea. "And skipping, and scattering imaginary seeds on the garden walk, and holding up your hand for an invisible fairy to sit on." She smiled. "Your mother sighed and rolled her eyes and said you'd better have proper singing lessons before you had time to develop any more bad habits."

"Mr Hathaway doesn't allow bad habits. Or twirling," Anthea began. Then she stopped. "Three wizards in space, one in America, one who lives in the Museum. And Howard's the youngest. Who's the seventh wizard?" She looked at Ann again.

Ann began to laugh. "Not me, if that's what you're thinking. The bit with the cat was the only magic I've ever been able to do, and, as I told you, it didn't last."

"The Goon," said Howard. "His name is Erskine, really, he told me that for the first time when I was ten. It was that that made me start writing down what he told me. I thought, if he really was a wizard, I'd have some kind of hold over him if he'd told me his true name. And I was afraid that once he'd told me, he'd make me forget he'd done it. So I wrote it down."

"I told a _wizard_ to get lost?" Anthea was fairly sure this was the worst thing she'd ever done. She'd been fond of pranks a few years ago, salted sugar and things like that, until Ann told her that professional musicians could be sacked for touching other people's things even by mistake. But nothing she'd ever done had been like this.

"You did," said Ann. "I told you it wasn't wise. You did it, so now it's on you to take it back."

"I thought you said she wasn't a wizard," said Howard.

"I'm not," said Anthea slowly. "I think I'm a bard."

"What do you think this is, Dungeons and Dragons?" Howard began to laugh at her. "I expect you'd like a magic harp? And bells on your shoes? You've already got a cloak--"

"Shut up, Gandalf." Anthea stuck her tongue out at him and went to do her singing practice.

 **December 13, 1988**

"Anthea! _Anthea_!" Howard waved at her from the other end of the station platform. He'd grown again, grown so tall that he didn't need to jump any more to be seen over the heads of the adults. Anthea left her cart where it was and eeled through the crowd to throw herself against the front of his duffle coat..

"Hello, brat," Howard said into the top of Anthea's hood. "I suppose I don't need to ask if you're glad to see me."

"If you call me `brat' ever again, I'll set your Asimov collection on fire," Anthea said. "I've got lots to tell you. Things I couldn't put in the letters. Will you come and pull the cart?"

"I see your school's set you on to expecting star treatment already," said Howard, but he followed Anthea back down the platform to where she'd left the cart with her trunk and knapsack. Anthea had had to lean backwards with all her might to get it moving. Howard put one hand around the front bar and started walking, and the cart followed after like a well-mannered dog.

Ann was waiting outside the station at the wheel of Mum's car. Howard lifted the trunk and bag into the back seat. Then Anthea had to take the cart back to the station door, and when she came back Howard had bagged the front passenger seat and was looking unbearably superior.

"Mine next time," said Anthea, and leaned back to enjoy the familiar sounds of Ann's one-sided argument with the concept of speed limits. Apart from going too fast, Ann was actually quite a good driver, but she existed in a perpetual state of war with Mum's car. Howard would be allowed to drive it soon, and treated the entire idea with an uneasy respect that seemed to have something to do with the noise the brakes made at traffic lights.

"We're going to the Museum first," said Ann, glancing at Anthea in the rearview mirror. "Mr Hathaway insisted."

"What, before I'd even been home?" said Anthea.

"He wants to know how your end-of-term results came out, and what you're going to do next term." Ann took the turn into Hammond Street a little too tightly, and dealt the steering wheel a sharp smack.

"I don't see why he can't use a telephone like ordinary people," grumbled Anthea, but she was secretly rather pleased. Her going away to school this year had been Mr Hathaway's idea. He hadn't answered any of her letters, either. Anthea knew he had no other music students, but certainly a wizard must be very busy. If Mr Hathaway wanted to see her, he must not have forgotten about her entirely.

Ann left Howard and Anthea at the front door of the Museum and went to park the car. Anthea untied her cape and slung it over her arm as they walked through the corridors. The door marked Curator  was just the same.

"I'll wait for you out here," said Howard, and fished a biro and notebook out of his duffle pocket. Since this was December, the notebook was extremely dog-eared and battered. The biro looked as though he'd been chewing on it.

Anthea tapped on the door. "It's open!" called a man's voice from the other side. There was a Mrs Hathaway, and they had a little boy, but they always found somewhere else to be while Anthea was having her lesson. The Hathaways resided in a part of the Museum that was fitted up as a sort of living-history exhibit, but Anthea thought the Museum must not have very much money to spend on keeping it up. Everything was shabby and well-used, and there never seemed to be groups of school children wandering through as there were in the other exhibits.

The exhibit had a courtyard, with real animals in it, and beyond it had been built to look like part of a house. The curtains of the house were always shut, which had puzzled Anthea until she found out about her teacher being a wizard. Mr Hathaway's library, where Anthea had her lessons, was just inside the front door. Anthea ran across the courtyard, dodging the chickens and two cats, and nearly collided with Mr Hathaway as he came out of the library.

"You'll break your nose someday doing that," said Mr Hathaway, squeezing her once fiercely and then putting her away from him with his hands on both shoulders. "Let me look at you. A quarter-inch taller, too many chocolates and not enough games," Anthea thought guiltily of the spots on her chin and the toffees she and the other girls had shared on the train, "and a head full of new questions. Just what I'd expect after your first term away at school."

Mr Hathaway drew Anthea back into the library and waved her to sit on one of the chairs in front of his desk. He sat behind it and turned over the hourglass that always ran during her lessons.

"I can see you're bursting to tell me something," said Mr Hathaway.

Anthea grinned at him. "Casting lists for next term's productions went up yesterday. I'm to be Celia in Iolanthe _and_ Puck in  A Midsummer Night's Dream." It still felt odd to say it, particularly the Dream. All of the female soloists in Io, except the Queen, were first-years. The teachers had chosen that particular opera to show off Amie Strand, the American girl who was playing Iolanthe. Amie was twelve, looked sixteen and sounded thirty. But Anthea was the only student below fifth year to be cast in Dream. "They haven't had a girl as Puck in something like twenty years, and never one so young as me."

Mr Hathaway looked a bit impatient. He had taught Anthea most of the music she chose, Sullivan and Quilter and Michael Head and the rest, but he had grumbled about doing it. "That's all very well. What about the rest of it?"

"I've passed the trials for both choirs next year," Anthea said. "The Academy Choir's doing a whole program of Monteverdi at Christmas." Mr Hathaway approved of that, she knew. Choral music pleased him, and very very old choral music pleased him best. "And Mr. Stanton's arranging something new for the treble choir, some Bach and Bruckner, but we don't know which ones yet. I'll write you when we know."

"Excellent," said Mr Hathaway. "The Bruckner's ambitious, but it will do you good to extend your reach a bit, even if your grasp doesn't match it yet. How about your academic exams?"

"All right," said Anthea. "Better in French and German, not so good in maths. About the same, really."

"Anthea," said Mr Hathaway sternly.

"I suppose you want to know if I've failed anything," said Anthea, examining her fingernails and trying not to squirm. Telling Mum and Dad was never going to be as difficult as telling Mr Hathaway. "Well, I haven't. Not exactly."

"Go on," said Mr Hathaway calmly.

Anthea sighed. "It's nothing, really. I'm going to have extra coaching next semester, except usually they only give that for students who need to catch up to the others in their year."

"You can't possibly be behind," said Mr Hathaway. "You're a year older than most other first-years, and your school here wasn't at all bad. It's only that there wasn't enough music there. Why are you having extra coaching?"

This was the difficult part. "I've been sneaking in to listen to one of the classes for fifth years and older," said Anthea. "And I got caught. It was Storytelling and Narrative Logic."

Mr Hathaway stared at her. "What on earth persuaded you to do such a thing?"

"I needed it," said Anthea, looking at her boots this time.

"Needed it? What for?" demanded Mr Hathaway, beginning to look angry.

Anthea knew she had been dreadfully stupid to listen to the class, and stupider still to get caught, and nothing made Mr Hathaway so angry as when she didn't think. However, she knew perfectly that not having told Mr Hathaway everything four years ago might have been stupidest of all. This was not a moment she had been looking forward to.

"Do you remember when I was eight," began Anthea, "and I began looking for songs that told stories?"

"Of course." Mr Hathaway glanced impatiently at the hourglass. "All those songbooks from the dustiest part of the Poly library. You brought me that peculiar piece about the woman who married a seal and was drowned, and the one about the Gilly's Rann. Things that were much too old for you. You won't be ready for the one about the seal for another ten years at least."

"Well, yes," said Anthea. "They were the wrong songs. But they were the right kind of songs. They were songs about making spells."

"And why," said Mr Hathaway in a peculiarly level voice, "would you need to know about making spells?"

"Because I made a mistake." Anthea looked up to meet his eyes. "I lost my temper and said something and it came true. And for four years I've been looking for a way to fix it."

"Four years," said Mr. Hathaway. "Four--Oh, Anthea. What did you do?" He said it the way Ann asked questions, in that way that meant they weren't really questions.

"The Goon. I mean, Erskine. It's Ann who called him the Goon. I told him to get lost." Saying it aloud never got any easier, especially since she couldn't say it to anyone except Ann and Howard. "And he has been. All this time. I needed to learn what kind of spell would bring him back. And since all I know how to do, really, is sing, songs about spells seemed the way to begin. Then I heard the older girls talking about their Narrative class, and I thought maybe what I needed was to find which way the story wanted to finish, and finish it. So I listened."

Mr Hathaway shut his eyes and put the ends of his fingers against his temples, as if his head hurt him. "Let me understand you. You told Erskine to get lost. And he got angry and walked away?"

"No. He vanished completely. Like snapping your fingers." Howard ducked his head and shouldered awkwardly through the low doorway. Ann came in behind him, without her coat and enormous shoulder bag, but still with a shawl wrapped round her head and shoulders. "Hello, Hathaway."

"Hello, Venturus," said Mr Hathaway, still in that strange even voice. "You're looking well." Anthea thought of pointing out that his eyes were still shut, but reminded herself in time-- _wizard_.

"So are you," said Howard. In the few months Anthea had been at school, Howard seemed to have become entirely an adult. It wasn't only that he was taller, and had new glasses and shaggier hair and had grown into the jumper Aunt Wendy had knitted him last year. It was that he spoke to Mr Hathaway as an equal. Anthea remembered, with a shock, that Mr Hathaway was after all Howard's brother.

"How much did you know about this?" said Mr Hathaway, opening his eyes and looking up at Howard.

"Not much," replied Howard. "Erskine had been visiting us for years, telling me and Anthea the story of what happened. I believed him and I didn't."

"You believed him, all right," said Mr Hathaway grimly. "If you hadn't, none of this would have been possible." He stood up, pushed his chair out of the way and paced from the desk to the door and back again. Ann slipped out of his way and sat down in the chair across from Anthea. "It was laid on us by our parents that we had to stay and look after you until you came to know your powers. Erskine and I had the idea that perhaps we didn't all have to stay behind, just some of us. We thanked our lucky stars when the three eldest were able to go."

"New York?" said Anthea.

Mr Hathaway stopped walking back and forth, and sat on the edge of his desk. "That was Torquil. He did say he'd stay if we needed him, but we wanted to try and do without. He would have gotten bored." Mr Hathaway said this as though Torquil being bored was like the Wicked Witch of the West getting wet. "So we enlisted help."

Howard and Anthea both turned to look at Ann. Mr Hathaway didn't. Anthea realized, then, that Mr Hathaway hadn't looked at Ann yet, or spoken to her, or--"You, er, can _see_ her, can't you, Mr Hathaway? She's not invisible or anything?"

"Of course he can see me," said Ann. "He's just too stubborn to acknowledge that what I did was right."

"It was dangerous!" bellowed Mr Hathaway. "And foolish and, and, _thoughtless_."

This word, coming from Mr Hathaway, seemed to have much the same effect on both Ann and Howard as it did on Anthea. Ann took a breath and let it out again. Finally, she looked at Howard and said, "You've read all the right books. What would you do if you knew you were going to go back in time and live part of your life over again? And make terrible mistakes unless you did something to stop yourself?"

"Leave myself a message," said Howard immediately. "Something that was broad enough that it was bound to get to me somehow. Something that it would make more changes to history to get rid of, than it would to just let it play itself out. Not a note," he continued thoughtfully, "nothing so, I don't know, _pointed_. Conspicuous. Time doesn't always notice what you've done, you know, not unless you call attention to it--"

"Enough," said Mr Hathaway, holding up a hand. "I shall begin tearing my hair out if you go on talking about time as though it were an inattentive schoolmaster."

"Did that really work?" Anthea asked Howard. "Can you dodge the rules like that?"

"You did leave a message," said Ann to Howard, exactly as if Anthea and Mr Hathaway weren't there. "You left _me_." She smiled at him.

Howard went absolutely white. Anthea noticed this with interest. She'd read about it in books, of course, but had never seen anyone do it--certainly not her sensible big brother. The books hadn't said anything about how much darker his eyebrows would look, or how his freckles would stand out.

"You served us wine," whispered Howard. "The second time around. I made the Goon take us to see Hathaway, and you brought in spiced wine, and tried to stay and listen." This seemed to upset him much more than the Goon's disappearance and his own returning memory had done, four years ago. Anthea did a bit of quick mental arithmetic and realized that when they had been here the second time, Ann would have been Howard's own age. The age he'd been at the time. This was harder to follow than the Goon's fairy tale.

"I hid behind the doors," said Ann, not taking her eyes off Howard. "And when you went through the Curator's door, I followed you."

Mr Hathaway muttered several things that sounded extremely rude. Ann ignored him and went on. "Dad--Mr Abraham from Natural History--he found me wandering about in the corridor, with no memory of anything except my name. You've met him. He didn't think I was much more unusual than the albino butterfly he was being sent from France. He took me home with him. Father," she looked over at Mr Hathaway, "had seen where I'd gone by then."

"My archives _changed_ ," spat Mr Hathaway. "I was looking at the book that showed your marrying and leaving town, and the words scattered like ants. That should not have been possible."

Anthea understood, then, that Mr Hathaway was frightened. He declared things to be impossible when they didn't work in a way he understood. "You keep records," she said to him. "Records tell what's happened. And what's happened can't be changed. But when Ann left home, she changed something. Have I got it right?"

Mr Hathaway nodded. "The first and second times, when all six of us were stuck here and had to share things out, I claimed records and archives. None of them could understand why I'd want it." He ran a hand backwards through his hair, what was left of it. "Lucky thing I had, anyways. When Ann went out the front door, I could create records that showed that she'd been born here, thirteen years earlier, to parents who'd died in a car accident. She had no guardian, and the local Child Protection were understaffed. The Abrahams had three children already, there was no trouble about them being approved to adopt a fourth."

"Not after you'd messed about with the approval records, there wouldn't be." Howard sounded angry. "How _could_ you just let her go, Hathaway?"

"For the same reason I've never let Anthea outstay her lesson!" shouted Mr Hathaway. "If you remember meeting Ann before, you remember that! She might have turned to dust for all I know!" He turned away, and saw Anthea's face. "Not," he added hastily, "that there was every any danger of it. Time runs differently in this house, that's all. You're quite all right here for a short time. Hence the hourglass. Anyways, she was perfectly safe. Neal and Ruth Abraham adored children and were happy to take in another."

"Oh, come now, Father," said Ann coolly. "Don't forget the important bit. You and Erskine needed me to help. Venturus had to be looked after until he knew about his powers. No one could say you weren't looking after Venturus if you sent your own daughter to help bring him up, could you?" She looked over at Howard. "I expect your parents think to this day that hiring a thirteen-year-old girl to come in after school and mind a _newborn infant_ was their own idea. Honestly."

Anthea felt rather shaky. She looked over at Howard, but he had opened his notebook and was scribbling furiously. Instead, she slid off her chair to lean against Ann's calves, and propped her chin on a bony knee. "If time runs differently here, are you immune? Is that why you didn't turn into a baby when Howard brought time back?"

"Time turned backwards and didn't take me with it," said Ann. "No one quite knew how the mixture of my parents' blood would turn out. Father--Hathaway--is a wizard, right enough. Mother's something else. Don't you know where you are yet?"

"A worn-out exhibit in the Museum," said Anthea. "Or..." She got up and went over to the nearest of Mr Hathaway's library windows. She put out a hand to pull back the curtain, then stopped and looked at Mr Hathaway. "If I pull this back, I'm not going to see the back wall of the exhibit, or even the street behind the Museum. Am I." It was quite easy, really, asking questions that weren't. Anthea felt sure that after today, she would never forget the trick of it.

"No," said Mr Hathaway. "It varies. I believe it's the Forest of Arden this week. It's real places most of the time, in the sixteenth century anyways, but some of Shakespeare's settings were hard to pin down as to exactly where and when he meant them to be."

"Under Hill," said Anthea. "But I've eaten here, dozens of times, and I can still come and go. It's not, not--Howard, what's it called where the mercury builds up in your blood over time until just a tiny bit more makes you ill?"

"Cumulative," said Howard absently.

"Yes, that."

"No," said Ann. "Mother said I could invite three friends. You and Howard are safe to eat and drink under the roof of my father's house, and so is Sam." Sam was one of the violinists in Ann's quartet. "You may also be able to sleep here safely, but I've never been moved to test it."

"No," said Anthea. "Better not. See here, if it took all three of you to look after Venturus--Howard--you minding him and then living with us, and you, "she nodded to Mr Hathaway, "keeping an eye out through me, and the Goon visiting all the time to tell Howard who he was..." She shook her head. "You only had to stay until Howard knew he was Venturus, didn't he?"

"Ye-es," said Mr Hathaway, sounding as though he were unrolling it in his mind. "On the day you lost your temper, Howard must have already believed the story, even if he didn't yet know it. I don't think you could have sent the Goon away unless the conditions under which he could leave had been met. Forgive me, my dear, but you haven't the power. Nothing else you've said has ever happened on command, has it?" Anthea shook her head. "That's a relief. I rather think that bringing him back may be the only piece of magic you'll ever do."

"It had better be," said Anthea. "I haven't time for another set of lessons."

"What did you learn?" asked Howard suddenly. All three of them whipped their heads round to look at him. "Sorry. I meant Anthea. What did you learn about creating the spell? From the Narrative Logic class."

"You were listening at the door." Anthea scowled at him. "I suppose you're going to tell Mum and Dad."

"Never mind," said Howard impatiently. "Did you find out what to do?"

"Not yet," Anthea told him. She turned to Mr Hathaway. "That was the bit I never got to tell you. Miss Hennon, who teaches the class, said I was to join it next term. I've got extra coaching with her every night until I'm caught up."

"Hang on," said Howard, "You broke a school rule, and they're rewarding you by giving you what you broke the rule to get?"

"Well, yes. Only they think it's punishment." Anthea sighed. "They don't know why I want it, you see. It's like the way Dad made you smoke the entire packet of cigarettes that time."

Howard glanced at Ann and went red. "Never mind that," he said.

"Don't tease him," Ann said. "He's afraid that if I find out all the silly things he's done, I won't take him overseas with me next summer."

This was news to Anthea. Their parents had been promising for years that Howard could celebrate his seventeenth birthday by traveling somewhere with Ann's quartet, if they'd have him. Sam and the others must have said yes. "Are you going to Los Angeles again?"

Ann shook her head. "Boston this time. It's right next door to Cambridge--not our Cambridge. Talking about American travel always sounds so _odd_. Anyways, Ed's got a friend at the Institute of Technology there that Howard really ought to meet." She smiled. "There's more than one way to travel in time."

 **December 13, 2008**

The wind had picked up again. It blew the falling snow around and showed where patches of it had begun to pack down and freeze on the more heavily-driven-upon patches of road. Anthea pulled the curtains shut. "That's it," she said. "No chance of your Dad getting home in all that mess."

Her daughter made a noise like a very small pigeon and pulled off her left sock again.

Anthea sighed and replaced the sock. Between Ann, Ann's mother, Ann's adoptive mother, Ann's friend Polly, and Anthea's mother-in-law, there was enough tiny homemade footwear in the house for an army of babies. Unfortunately, Kit had proved thus far to be very sensitive to texture, and only her grandmother's socks were knitted of a smooth enough wool to avoid rasping her skin. Her habit of taking them off and losing them occasionally required all seven grownup members of her household to drop what they were doing and participate in a Sock Hunt. It had proved simpler to keep an eye on her and put them back on as quickly as she removed them.

" _Clever_ Kit," said Anthea, pulling the sock as high as it would go and depositing a kiss on the nearly nonexistent tip of her daughter's nose. "You're so clever that you're bright enough to keep your socks on, aren't you? Of course you are."

A stomping sound outside the front door announced that someone, at any rate, had made it home. The lock turned, and a blast of cold air brought the smell of snow and anti-freeze into the house with it.

"Hello!" called Adam, unwrapping his muffler. "Who's home?"

"Me," Anthea called back. "And the Misplacer Of Socks. In here. Boots off, please."

There was a pause, long enough for the unknotting of wet bootlaces and the removing of various of layers of wool, and then Adam came padding along the passage from the front hallway to the kitchen. Behind him, Ellen was leaning on the passageway wall to pull on her slippers.

Adam scooped Kit out of her basket and swung her over his head. She giggled. He was much the tallest person in the house. "Been good today, pet?" Then, to Anthea, "Have you heard from Gabriel?"

Anthea nodded. "He's stuck at Orly, and they haven't said yet how long they think it'll be. Felix rang, too. He's staying in town in case it's too messy to drive tomorrow."

Ellen rinsed out her triple-sized mug under the tap and pressed the button on the coffeemaker. "I told him that contract needed a second look-through before he signed it."

"You did," said Anthea. "I don't think it mattered, though. Yes, thanks." She held out her cup in response to Adam's raised eyebrows and proffered teapot. Adam propped Kit on his hip and poured the tea with his other hand. "He'd stay in the dormitory with the students even if the contract didn't say so. Lots of them can't go home for Christmas, and being in a Christmas ballet only makes it worse."

"How many are coming here?" said Adam slyly. "Truth, now, not what you've told your mum."

"Ten," admitted Anthea. Ellen spun round with a muffled squeak.

"Seven of them have sponsors," protested Anthea. "It's not nearly as expensive as it sounds. And it's not as though dancers eat much, anyways."

"It's not that!" said Ellen. "Where are you going to _put_ them all? Max will have a fit if anyone sets foot in his room while he's gone."

"He and Cathy aren't back until after the New Year, maybe later if the _Messenger_ decides they want her piece about the new Academy in Toronto," Anthea said. "The girls are coming tomorrow night, if the snow stops, and the dormitory will let them back in on the twenty-eighth. And anyways, he's sixteen now. If he's old enough to be allowed to tour next summer, he's old enough to learn what it means not to have his own room all the time."

"That's his mother's business, not yours," said Ellen sharply. "If Cathy hasn't said anything to him about it, it's not your place to--"

"Enough." Adam held up a hand in a stop-traffic gesture. "I'll have a word with him about it, man-to-man." He broke off at the looks on their faces. "What? D'you think just because I bat for the other team, I can't have a man-to-man chat with someone?"

"No," said Ellen, laughing. "I just think you'd be better off not putting it that way."

"And you'd better not be holding a drooling baby when you try it. Here, hand her over." Anthea held out her hands for her daughter and pulled the ever-present towel out of her belt to deal with the dribble.

"Two of them in Max's room," said Adam. "And two more in Cathy's, I suppose. And the empty room in the attic will take two more. What about the other four?"

"They'll have to toss up for the beds," said Anthea. "The four that lose are going to be in sleeping bags in Gabriel's den."

"You can't put them down there!" said Adam, horrified. "It's a basement. They'll freeze."

"Electric heaters," said Anthea, wiping Kit's chin. "Ann brought them over today before the snow began. The girls are going to sleep on the pull-outs in the small room at night, and they'll have it for a lounge during the day so they can study. Felix's studio is big enough for them all to practice at once, as long as we take all the boxes out. Gabriel said we could, if we moved them carefully."

"If _I_ moved them, you mean," sighed Adam. "All right. Come on, Ellen. Let's see how bad this is going to be."

"I'll be up in a sec," said Ellen. She was rummaging in the pots-and-pans cupboard under the counter. Anthea glanced at the whiteboard over the table. Ellen's name was scrawled in for Dinner Prep every day this week--she must have taken all Cathy's turns along with her own.

"Go ahead," said Anthea. "I'll see to dinner. There's plenty of things put up in the freezer already."

"Oh, would you?" Ellen emerged from the cupboard, red-faced from bending double, and set the biggest pot on the stovetop. "Try the bottom right-hand corner, there ought to be stew there." She brushed a kiss on the top of Kit's tiny hoodie and thundered up the stairs after Adam.

Anthea set Kit, now mostly asleep, back in her basket and swept the day's accumulated rubbish off the table. Newspapers in the box behind the front staircase, sheet music on top of the piano, paint catalogue and electric bill and four magazines in Adam's and Gabriel's shared in-tray in the pantry

Howard's Christmas card had arrived in that day's mail. It had a family photo on the front. Howard and his wife grinned hugely, each holding a blue-eyed toddler. Next to Peggy stood Professor Murry, one hand wrapped tightly in the leash of an enormous black Labrador. They'd taken the photo in the Professor's front yard, but Anthea suspected his appearance in it constituted a last-minute change of plans.

Peggy O'Keefe had told Anthea at the wedding that she'd decided, the first time her uncle brought Howard home to Sunday dinner, that she was going to marry him when she grew up. The O'Keefe children (there were seven of them, the oldest Howard's age) were accustomed to running in and out of their uncle's lab at the Institute whenever their parents brought them to Boston. Howard's first letters home from university had described the distracting effect this had on his studies, but apparently somewhere along the line he'd reached a compromise. Anthea smiled at the picture and used one of Cathy's post earrings to tack it to the notice-board on her way to cope with dinner.

A loud thump sounded from somewhere in the top floors of the house, followed by a string of swear words. Startled, Anthea banged her head on the inside of the freezer and bit off a similar reaction before she woke the baby. She dragged two large ziplocked plastic bags out of the heap of unidentified frozen objects at the very back, and scraped at the label.

 **Mu Stu LgWht** said the label helpfully.

Anthea decided that, in Cathy's mind, this indicated beef stew with white beans in it. She emptied the frozen blocks of (hopefully) stew into the big pot and turned on the stove. While she was peering into the bread drawer, the doorbell rang. Kit jerked awake and began to wail.

"Coming, coming!" shouted Anthea. She picked up Kit and hurried along the passageway, patting the baby's back and slipping in her sock feet through the puddles of melted snow in the front hall. It was a house rule that whoever was closest to the front door answered it. Adam worked from home most days and had grown to hate the sound of the bell. Anthea nearly tripped over the mat. She caught herself, shifted Kit to her other arm, and turned the lock.

The Goon was standing on her front porch.

Anthea opened her mouth. She closed it. She closed her eyes and opened them again.

"Come a long way," said the Goon.

"Of course," said Anthea breathlessly. "And you're letting in the snow. Come in." She stepped back and let the Goon duck through the doorway. "Boots...no, never mind, I'll have to mop as it is." She heard her own voice, babbling, talking to the Goon as though he were Mr-Davis-next-door, or one of her students, instead of a wizard who'd disappeared at her command twenty-four years ago.

The Goon followed her into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Anthea wasn't at all surprised to see that he chose the chair that let him put his back against the wall and see the rest of the kitchen, just as he had always done in her parents' house. He and Kit regarded each other with interest.

"I...Here." Anthea reached backwards to the counter for Ellen's enormous coffee mug. "Do you want coffee? Or tea?"

"Coffee's fine," said the Goon. "Just coffee." He nodded at Kit. "Yours?"

"Yes," said Anthea, hoping he couldn't see her hands shaking as she poured out the coffee. "Catriona Maud, after her grandmothers. We call her Kit." She turned back to the Goon and handed him the mug. "I'm married. To Felix Doone Penny, the ballet dancer. Well, I mean, he doesn't dance now, he teaches. Teaches ballet. _Where have you been?_ "

"Lost," said the Goon. He sipped the coffee. "Good coffee."

"I'll tell my housemate you like it, it's hers," said Anthea. "I don't mean when you were lost. I mean, where have you been for the past fourteen years?"

"Told you," said the Goon. "Lost."

Anthea put Kit back in her basket and dropped onto the chair opposite the Goon. "You can't have been. We found the words to take it back."

"Words?" said the Goon.

"Well, yes." Anthea felt as though she were back in the Museum trying to explain herself to Mr Hathaway. "I studied. At school. Narrative Logic. Seven years." Miss Hennon had explained that the Academy of St. Hilary had been established for two basic purposes: to prepare students for professional careers in music or art or dance or theatre, and to teach students to use and control any magical abilities they might have. Her Storytelling and Narrative Logic class concerned both purposes, and the Academy library contained some very unusual reference materials.

"It took years for me to even understand what I'd done," Anthea went on. "I commanded you. I shouldn't have been able to. I haven't any magic, and you weren't bound to me in any way."

"Related?" The Goon looked interested.

"Well, yes, if you go back far enough. My mother descended from Hathaway's son, so if you leave out all the generations in between, you're a sort of uncle. There are an awful lot of generations, though." Anthea reached out a finger and Kit wrapped her tiny fist around it. "It would have taken--it _took_ an awfully strong will to shore up that bond enough for the command to take."

"Strong enough," agreed the Goon. He chuckled. "Called you Awful, before. Everyone did. You were stubborn, and you could yell."

"Yes. About that," said Anthea. "Howard did tell me, eventually."

"Tell you what?"

"Why you saved your truest story until I was old enough to understand. And why you kept asking me to promise to help you with some secret project when I grew up." She looked at him. "And why he had to go back and do everything a third time."

The Goon shifted his enormous feet under the table. "Wasn't supposed to know."

"No," said Anthea. "And if you'd waited a few more minutes, he might not have known. But he was Venturus, and he saw the future. He told me you had it in mind to ask me to help you rule the world."

The Goon looked mulish. "Not all of it."

"What is _wrong_ with you?" said Anthea impatiently. "I'm glad I haven't got any magic, if it makes wizards go mad for ruling over ordinary people!"

"Don't need magic," the Goon said proudly. "Enough for both of us. You were the only person more stubborn than me. Keep me from becoming like Archer."

Anthea closed her eyes. "Did it ever occur to you," she said slowly, "that it might have saved you a lot of trouble if you'd _said_ that's why you wanted me to help?"

The Goon appeared to think for a moment. "No," he said at last. "More coffee?"

"In the glass thing on the counter." Anthea waved in the direction of the coffeemaker. "All right, look. Whyever you did it, you did it once too often. I was young, and you made me angry, and I wanted you to go away. And somehow, I found just the right combination of words to make what I wanted happen."

Kit made the small pigeon noise. The Goon reached over absently and rocked her basket.

"If words got rid of you," Anthea went on, "words ought to have brought you back. The right words, anyways."

Silence from the other side of the table.

Anthea felt a bit nettled. "So, I studied all the stories I could find about people being lost, and about how they found their way back. And when I thought I'd got it, I went back and set it up again." They'd waited until Ann had come home from tour, and had even found the same teacup to sit on the table in front of her. Howard had laid out the chair she'd knocked over with her cape. When she'd put on the cape, it had barely covered her knees, and the whole thing had felt extremely peculiar.

"What words did you say?" asked the Goon, as though he were asking nothing more interesting than the weather.

"I said," Anthea began. "I said...Oh." She looked all around her kitchen, Adam's and Gabriel's kitchen, Cathy's and Ellen's kitchen, as though it was the last time she would ever see it. It was warm and brightly lit, and soup was bubbling away on the stove, and there had inexplicably been room for the piano in the corner by the doorway. And her daughter, the most beautiful thing she had ever seen, was lying placidly in her basket on one of the kitchen chairs that Max and Felix had painted dark green.

"When you didn't come to see us again," said Anthea in a low voice, "I only thought you were angry with me. And when you didn't come to see Mr Hathaway, I told him you'd been angry with him, too, before. I made the spell, and I thought I found the way to break it thirteen years ago, so I stopped looking."

"Heard you," said the Goon. "Heard you saying `Go home'. Knew who I was, then. Hadn't, before. Didn't know where I was, or where to go." He ran a hand through his hair, as Hathaway had once done. Hathaway's hair was wispy, but the Goon had let his grow and it flopped into his eyes. "Saw most of the world before I was done." His jeans and boots were dirtier than she remembered, but he'd found a new jacket somewhere. The expression of deliberate foolishness Anthea remembered was gone, and he only looked horribly tired.

"Those couldn't have been the right words," said Anthea slowly. "Your parents had turned you out, your brothers and sisters had gone away, except Hathaway. And Howard. And I had said--I had said you'd come to our house when no one had asked you. Erskine. Goon. I did find the right words to break the spell." She shook her head.."No, I _made_ the right words. Except that I'd already made it so that the conditions for the spell being broken couldn't be met." She suddenly, desperately, wanted Felix to come home.

Oh.

Anthea looked up at the Goon. He was smiling at her. "Knew you'd figure it out in the end," he said. "Not stupid, even if you did go to a school Hathaway picked."

"They weren't the right words yet," said Anthea, feeling as though she were watching a sunrise. "It wasn't `go home'. It was `come home'."

The Goon nodded. "Had to be a home where you had the right to invite me. Your own home you made yourself." Anthea remembered Ann saying, _My mother told me I could invite three friends_. "Didn't have to say the words, really. Worked better if you thought you weren't thinking about them."

A loud thundering noise made them both jerk suddenly, and woke Kit again. Anthea laughed. "Never mind. It's only Adam and Ellen. All the staircases are hollow. It makes the place sound like it's inhabited by a herd of elephants."

Adam dashed headlong into the kitchen and skidded to a stop in front of the stove. "It's all very well to make dinner, Thea, but no one can eat it if it's burned."

"Sorry," said Anthea. "Adam, this is my uncle Erskine. Erskine, this is Adam Newman. He owns half this house. Adam, there's not anyone staying in the attic bedroom, is there?"

"Well, your students were going to," said Adam. He smiled broadly at the Goon. "But they're small. They'll squash into the basement lounge somehow."

"All right," said Anthea quietly, under the sounds of Adam fetching plates and three more mugs. "It seems I've got a Goon again. What am I going to do with you?"

The Goon thought about this. "Hold the baby?" he suggested.

"Maybe later." Anthea reached across the table and picked Ellen's coffee mug out of his hands. "Right now, you'd better get your boots off. And wash your hands. Dinner's in five minutes."

**Author's Note:**

> A thousand thanks to athenejen for the quick and friendly beta, and for shepherding me through my first Yuletide.
> 
> My stories tend to turn into a game of Spot The Crossover. Ann Abraham and her friends are from DWJ's _Fire and Hemlock_ , James Stanton is from Susan Cooper's _The Dark Is Rising_ , (Felix) Doone Penny and his family are from Rumer Godden's _Thursday's Children_ , Adam Newman is from the 1990s TV series "The Tomorrow People", Gabriel Bowman is from the 2002 TV series "Witchblade", Ellen Carroll is from Pamela Dean's Secret Country trilogy, Cathy Burton is from Gordon Korman's Macdonald Hall series, and Charles Wallace Murry and Peggy O'Keefe are from the novels of Madeleine L'Engle. I've taken varying amounts of liberties with the personalities and histories of all the characters named above. Anyone else who's named or referred to is, so far as I know, my own invention.


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